


To Reason Why

by Brightknightie



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: 15th Century, Doctors & Physicians, Gen, Medicine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 10:45:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13075233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Brightknightie
Summary: Methos takes up his first employment as a physician in 1453.





	To Reason Why

**Author's Note:**

  * For [morgynleri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/gifts).



_August 1453, Rome_

“Here we are, Maestro Leech.” The horse under Johann stopped as if it had understood the bravo’s words. “Are you feeling grand enough to meet your new patron?”

Methos grinned and reined in his own mount. “First impressions last.”

They could have reached the envoy’s townhouse last night. Instead, Methos had insisted that they rest outside the city’s walls. This morning, he had bathed, shaved, and, despite the beastly heat, donned the fur-lined red gown of his calling as a physician for the first time since they left Heidelberg. The oiled-leather pouch with his doctorate, license, and letters hung around his neck. He carried no visible weapons.

Methos had been a century in the north. The sun-drenched Italian peninsula seemed almost as strange to him now as it would to the freshly-minted Rhenish physician he wasn’t… and yet was.

“The groom will put your baggage in your quarters.” Johann dismounted; Methos followed suit. “One of the maids will unpack for you.” 

“The little chest holds glass—”

“Never fear. They’ll handle your belongings as carefully as the envoy’s own. Likely they’ll think they’re magic, anyway.”

“What makes you think they’re not?”

Johann snorted and opened the door. “This way, Maestro.”

Across the threshold, Methos felt the rumble of immortal presence.

His forearm may have flexed against the knife up his sleeve. But his step was unruffled. He didn’t look over his shoulder, or strain his eyes to see every corner of the foyer, dark after the full sunlight. Let any merely passing immortal suppose that it was the burly Johann, not this slight physician, who carried a quickening to take. Yet if this other were part of his new patron’s household… Plans and hopes teetered. Of course he was ready to run. He was always ready to run. But his stomach clenched. He had wanted this. Needed this?

“Johann! You’re back! What news from the Palatinate?” A sandy-haired stripling in a pleated doublet ran to them.

Johann bowed slightly. “Young master Max, allow me to present Maestro Adamus.”

Methos recalled that there were two sons, spaced by three daughters and the usual losses. The heir — Ruprecht, was it? — aged just shy of his majority, while this little lad had about the years to start as a page or ‘prentice.

Max backed up a step and bowed, stiffly correct. “Welcome, Maestro. My father has been expecting you.” Then he looked around and dropped his voice. “Do you really have to study for eight whole years to be a physician?”

“You really do. And then you have to answer questions for days on end about what you’ve learned.”

“Ugh!” Max shuddered. “Why become a physician, then?”

“I rather like studying,” Methos confided. “But I didn’t think I’d make a good monk.”

Johann turned a laugh into a cough. “Young master, where may we find your father?”

“In the chancery with his clerks. Everyone else is in the solar, or out looking for my brother.”

The men stared.

“Oh, has no one told you yet? Ruprecht didn’t come home last night.”

Johann raised an eyebrow.

“We’d best report to the envoy first,” Methos said, “then offer what aid we can.”

☤

“My lord?” Johann scratched respectfully on the door of the writing office before entering, with Methos a few steps behind on the narrow staircase.

Three busy men looked up from a table covered in papers and parchments. The envoy was instantly distinct from his clerks. The Prince-Elector’s minister resident to the papal court looked as vigorous and decorous as his correspondence had read. Steel-gray hair and a furrowed brow defied age. His cloisonne belt and rings had been crafted tastefully short of the sumptuary laws, yet somehow suggested that it would have been no trouble to exceed them. He wore a high-collared blue overgown of a kind familiar in the Palatinate, but without the customary fur lining. 

Perhaps, Methos thought wistfully, as sweat dripped down his back, the fur could be detached until winter… To his relief, neither the envoy nor the clerks were the source of the immortal resonance. So who was? The distraction divided his energies.

Johann bowed. “I present the learned Maestro Adamus of Heidelberg University, for whom you sent.”

In a moment, Methos and the envoy were alone.

“Please, sit.” The envoy gestured to the bench below the glass window, and occupied one end himself. “I know what the journey from the Palatinate takes out of a man. I trust that a seemly bed and ample table will soon restore you.”

“Good sleep and wholesome food can accomplish wonders,” Methos agreed. Was this a hint to manifest his medical expertise? Or was the envoy chaffing a soft scholar? “Little balances the humors more pleasantly than sensible moderation, forestalling a need for — active interventions.”

“Like bloodletting and purgatives?” The envoy chuckled. “From our correspondence and mutual acquaintance, I feel almost as if I know you, Maestro, enough that I’ve laid the wager of bringing you here. Yet you puzzle me! You’re a man who likes his comforts. You’re also a man who relishes a challenge.”

“Some kinds of challenges more than others,” Methos admitted. He watched the envoy watch him. “To build a practice in Rome herself, from beneath the Prince-Elector’s long arm and sheltering wing — to do well while doing good, is that what they say?”

“Is that why you became a physician?”

Methos blinked. The other immortal’s presence pounded between his ears. He took a deep breath and shrugged. “Every sane man seeks a roof over his head and a hearth at his feet.” He looked out the window into a lush garden he wouldn’t have suspected from the street. “A physician’s labor is worth his keep.”

“Indeed.” The envoy leaned back. “You do understand fully that, beyond my household and our countrymen here, your patients must come by priority from among those with whom the Palatinate negotiates and transacts?”

“I do, my lord.” Methos bowed his head. The he raised his chin. “And you do understand fully that, while all intelligence is yours without qualm, a patient’s health is his alone? As a physician, I will neither commit nor countenance physical harm to those in my care.”

“Glad I am to hear it, Maestro!” The envoy stood and clapped him on the shoulder. “Set your boundary and hold it firm against all siege, including me — or the Prince-Elector, or the Pope himself.”

“We’ve found him! We’ve found Ruprecht!” Max’s voice shrieked happily from below. “Johann is bringing him!”

☤

Footsteps pelted up from downstairs. They thumped more carefully down from upstairs. The envoy strode out with Methos close on his heels. The landing erupted in people, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. A babbling boy and a placating groom. A crowd of servants. Several genteel ladies, surely the envoy’s wife and daughters. Surely...

Except. Her. The short one. She turned. The immortal presence crested and subsided at last.

Grace.

Relief washed quickly over the face of the petite woman with the huge dark eyes. Methos felt the same. Not only was the inside of his skull again as quiet as it ever got, this immortal was no stranger. His rattled memory dove to the last time they’d spoken. Her startling live-and-let-live ways returned to him, wrapped with an image of lush brown hair escaping a simple braid after a long day, not hidden away under today’s embroidered hennin...

Grace reached up and grabbed his ear, like a child’s scolding tutor. Rising on tiptoes, under the chattering din, she whispered, “Hush! I presume you’re the famous Maestro Adamus. He and I have not yet met. And if you take my head, you know I’ll never forgive you.”

She looked amused. Then concern for the prodigal son and his family reshaped her manner, as a girl tugged on one of her hands, and her other arm went around a woman’s waist. The crush of people swept her away.

“Maestro Leech!” Johann bellowed from the foyer. “We could use your assistance. Someone fetch a chair with a back...”

Methos had lost sight of the envoy; he hurried to catch up. He found the crowd now packed into the entrance hall. A strong young man in a daringly short doublet and garish hose sagged against Johann’s shoulder. The sufferer looked pale and petulant, weakly batting away the hands reaching out to him. As a servant brought the requested chair, and Johann and the envoy settled the man into it, Methos saw gashes in the rich garments, and glimpsed matching damage to the body beneath.

“Ruprecht, this is Maestro Adamus,” the envoy said.

“I told you, I’ll be fine.” Ruprecht drooped in the chair as Methos bent over him. “Besides, wounds are for the barber-surgeon, not a physician.”

“Yet I’m here, and the surgeon isn’t.” Methos inspected the lacerations and bruising. Ruprecht wasn’t wrong; a university education had much less to say about the external damage that men inflict on one another than about the internal effects of astral conjunctions and unbalanced humors. But a youth who stank of spirits and had evidently survived many hours since he gave or took insult? Methos felt equal to the task. “I appreciate your care for my prestige — or are you concerned that I don’t know how to sew you up?”

Ruprecht’s feeble laugh turned into a cough. The envoy’s wife frowned.

“The Salerno medical school trains its physicians to be competent surgeons,” Grace softly reassured her. “I’m sure Heidelberg does no less.”

“Madame Graciela is from Spain,” Johann explained.

“Well, of course, that makes everything perfectly clear,” Methos muttered under his breath. Louder, he said: “Would someone please fetch—” The usual instruments were pressed into his hands, and a lit lamp produced besides. “Ah! Thank you.”

“Everyone, return to your duties.” The envoy was firm. “Max, girls, you also. Give the physician space and air.”

Soon, only the envoy, his wife, Ruprecht, and Methos remained. The envoy’s wife sighed. “Who was it this time?”

“A Florentine!” Ruprecht turned his face toward the ceiling, away from his wounds and their mending. “Dog! He and his comrades spoke vile sarcasams upon the Palatinate and her folk. Trust that I did not let them stand.”

“Last month it was Venetians. Before that, Brabantines, of all the peoples!” The envoy paced to the window and back, his shadow moving across Methos’s work. “What are you thinking when you do these things? Are you thinking at all?”

“I’m thinking of honor, father! Yours! And the Prince-Elector’s!”

“The Prince-Elector and I can take care of our own honors, boy—”

The envoy’s wife laid her hand on his arm. “Ruprecht, how fared your opponent in this quarrel?”

“I aimed to strike him across the face, of course! But he turned his head at just the moment, and I hit under his ear. I gave only two blows, on my word, but... he fell at the second.”

“Dead?”

Silence. Methos couldn’t resist looking up from his hands to the boy’s ashen face.

“I don’t know.” Ruprecht’s voice was suddenly small and lost. “His friends carried him off.”

The envoy strode out of the room. His wife looked after him, but stayed and took her son’s hand. “He’ll send Johann to find what is true, and what must be done.”

“I know.” Ruprecht swallowed. “I suppose, Maestro, that you’ve never killed a man.”

Methos kept his eyes on his swift fingers. “You’re mistaken.”

“Oh?”

The envoy’s wife asked, “Was that part of your calling to become a physician?”

Methos finished what he was doing. He straightened up and stepped back. He started to cross his arms, but paused at the sight of his red sleeves. “When factions contend or armies invade, bold men die. On all sides. A physician is too valuable to willfully kill.”

“So you’re afraid of death?” Ruprecht mocked.

“Absolutely. There’s nothing I fear like Death.” Methos rubbed his tired eyes. “Come, let’s get you into bed. You need rest and meat broths to restore your humors.”

☤

“Here you are, Maestro.” The servant opened a door at the far end of the top story. He handed Methos his candle, bowed, and disappeared back into the night.

Methos raised the candle high. He turned all the way around, vaguely astonished that the space was still wholly new to him. This day had felt like years. Finding the furnishings satisfactory and his possessions in place, he stripped off his sweat-soaked gown and hung it on a peg. In shirt and hose, he opened the window shutter all the way and leaned out into the evening. A breeze blessed his forehead.

He’d dined with the family and Grace. Methos had felt the holes in the meal conversation as thoughts unspoken turned to his patient. Across dishes, he’d learned that Madame Graciela was a dear friend of the envoy’s wife, and a wealthy widow with a far-flung apothecary enterprise. She’d looked content.

Methos wanted to feel content.

Scratching at his door called back his thoughts. Who could want him at this hour, after this day? Oh, yes: anyone. A physician’s vocation was not unlike a cleric’s that way. “Enter!”

It was Grace. She joined him in the relative cool.

“Does visiting a man’s chamber alone imperil your reputation?” he asked mildly.

“A widow in Rome enjoys remarkable leeway. I imagine more households are headed by women here than anywhere in the world. No, not just the courtesans.” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “Cloistered communities can take care of themselves, but men on their own in cities? They need laundresses, housekeepers, cooks, seamstresses, charwomen—”

“Apothecaries?”

“Oh, apothecaries most of all.” She laughed. “A woman can’t train, of course, so I arranged an inheritance in lieu of an apprenticeship. And you? Did you really matriculate from the University of Heidelberg?”

“I really did.”

“Congratulations!” She shook her head. “Not that I doubt your intelligence, but I can hardly imagine you staying put long enough.”

“I’d been on the move for a while,” he admitted. Just over a century, come to think of it. The second-worst century he remembered for himself. Possibly the worst for humanity. He shied away from the memories as from hot coals. The city below and beyond his window thrummed reassuringly full of people. Living people. “It was time for a change.”

“Even if that change is to not change for a bit?” Grace fished gently. “You’re committed to a single location in a complex web — yes, I know that the envoy is an intelligencer; I’m not a child.” She drummed her fingers on the windowsill. “No ingredients or compounding in Rome can best mine. I’m looking forward to working with you, if you honestly plan to live up to that robe you were wearing today. Do you?”

“I took an oath.” Bone-tired in a strange place, Methos saw long-quelled memories flickering up like sparks from a hearth. Had Grace lit that fire? Or had it been banked since he first fled north with the plague at his heels a hundred years gone? “That oath isn’t yet forsworn.”

Grace took his hand. “My friend, you were no healer when last we met. Why are you a physician now?”

A dry heave wracked his chest. Methos tasted tears. He hadn’t stayed away long enough. He’d stayed away too long.

“I remember,” Methos said. “Do you remember? Before the Great Mortality.” The people. So many more people. So much more cultivated land. Villages. Cities. The memories rolled in like a fog. “In some places, people had actually thought that they could run out of space! Can you imagine?” His words were low but fast, too fast. He made himself breathe. He made the memories blank. “When the dying started, I had a family. I soon didn’t. That’s all.”

“Is it?”

Methos turned his back to the window and sat on the floor beneath it. Grace sat with him. He shifted his hand from her palm to her wrist so that he could feel her pulse prove her life.

“The first victims had black swellings that oozed. They died in about five days. Then there were those with fevers who spit blood. They died in three days. Or less. Then those who went to bed well and died before they woke...” He saw faces, alive and then dead, as fast as he could blink. Faces with names and promises and quarrels. With favorite foods uneaten and treasured ribbons unworn. “In a quarter to half a year, the killing seemed to stop. But each spring meant new death.”

“You went north for the winters?”

“I went where people said it wasn’t. Sometimes, it got there before I did.” He stared into the candle burning across the room. “There’d been pestilences before. Numberless. Endless. But not like this. They say a third of the world died. I tell you, the whole world died. I thought it was the start of the Gathering. I knew it was Hell.”

Grace shifted their grasp, putting her thumb on his pulse. “You don’t want to feel that helpless again.”

After a while, she kissed his cheek, and went to her own bed.

Methos stared at the back of the door until the candle guttered. In the silent dark, he breathed, “I never want to be that useless again.”

  


**— end —**

  


**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Highlander_ , which belongs to Davis/Panzer. Please don’t mistake it for anything else.
> 
> **Inspiration & canon.** For HLH_Shortcuts 2017, MorgynLeri requested Methos, minor immortals, original characters, and the 15th century. In “One Minute to Midnight,” Methos tells Joe that he got his medical degree in Heidelberg in 1453. In “Judgment Day,” the “let friendship thrive” speech suggests subsequent time in Italy. Grace, of course, is from “Saving Grace.” Also, when I was first brainstorming, Skieswideopen asked a question that became the story’s fuel.
> 
> **Works consulted.** Among other books happily on my shelf, I re-read chunks of _Life in a Medieval City_ by Joseph and Frances Gies (1969), _Street Life in Renaissance Rome_ by Randolph M. Bell (2013), _The Renaissance_ by Will Durant (1953), and _A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century_ by Barbara W. Tuchman (1978). Plus the inevitable Wikipedia and some Great Courses lectures.
> 
> **Beta.** Batdina exposed my typos, pointed out my digressions, and boosted my confidence, even though she was sick when the deadline loomed. Batdina, thank you so much!
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Let me know what you think?


End file.
